Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I want to begin today with a chart that I usually use near the end of this presentation when I'm talking to an audience. I frequently don't have time to develop the chart as fully as one might, so I thought that today I would begin with this chart.

As I've said before, if you had only one chart that you could look at to get some idea as to where we are relative to the liquid fuel situation in the world, this would be the chart.

Let me first make a comment or two about energy in general. There's a lot of discussion of energy. Sometimes we talk about the various kinds of energy as if they were interchangeable. We will talk about electricity. We will talk about natural gas, and we will talk about oil. When we have a sudden increase supply of one--natural gas today-- the assumption is made by some that, gee, we then don't have a problem with oil, do we, because we've had a problem with oil.

Now, for some uses these energy sources are fungible, they're exchangeable, and you can use one or the other. For instance, if you want to ride in a bus, we used to have buses that had a trolley on top and wires up there, and they were run with electricity. You see them run with natural gas, and most of them are run with a petroleum product that comes from oil. So with proper engineering, you can use any of these energy sources to run a bus. And streetcars, of course, were a bus on rails, and we've taken those out of most of our cities now.

But you will never run an airplane on anything but some product from oil. You cannot possibly get enough energy stored in a battery to do that. And natural gas, those molecules are very small and they don't like each other at all. They try to get as far apart as possible, so we squeeze on them to put them close together and under some considerable pressure, but we just can't get them to liquify so that we can get any concentrated energy source there. So for our airplanes, for instance, we're stuck with some product from oil.

For automobiles, we could certainly run them on electricity. We can certainly run them on natural gas. We now run most of them--about 97 percent of our transportation comes from oil. But to do that, we have to make a lot of changes in engineering and manufacturing, and it takes a long while to do that. The fleet out there runs about 16 to 18 years before you turn the fleet over, so it would be a long while before we could introduce a meaningful number of cars running on something other than some product of oil. Then we have to develop the infrastructure to support that.

We have been, now, 100 years in this country developing our current infrastructure. In this country, in the world, we are finding the oil. We are developing the fields for pumping the oil. We are transporting the oil. We're refining it. We're hauling it to the service stations. And there are millions of them around the country, wherever it's convenient and customers will come there and the owner can make a profit. One might note that government was hardly involved at all in any of these activities. It was the marketplace that drove this. But today we're going to be talking about oil.

We face a special crisis in oil; and it's not there in natural gas, and it's not there in electricity. For those who would have you believe that, because we can put in more nuclear power plants and wind and solar and micro hydro and true geothermal for electricity, we don't need to worry about oil because we can do it with electricity or natural gas, we can do it with natural gas; but we cannot change that quickly to avoid a crisis with oil if, indeed, we can't find enough oil to meet our demands.

Well, this is the one chart that I told you that if we had only one chart this would be the one that would tell you the most about where we've come from and where we're going with oil. This is billions of barrels per year that have been discovered here. These are the years in which they have been discovered on the bottom, and the bars here indicate the volume of that discovery.

You can see that we started discovering it way back in the thirties a little bit, and then a bunch in the forties; and, wow, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies and even into the eighties we were discovering oil.

If you add up all of these bars here, you get the total amount of oil that the world has found, and the amount that we have used is represented by this heavy dark line here. The amount that we've used is the same as the amount that we've produced because we're not storing anywhere any meaningful quantities of oil. So the production rate and the consumption rate are essentially the same thing.

There are several interesting things about this chart. Notice that from about the 1970s on, we have found less and less and less oil. And that was while we had a greater and greater interest in finding oil because we had a greater and greater use for oil.

The dark line here shows our use rate, and you notice that it was increasing exponentially up through the early seventies. Had this curve continued, and you can extrapolate it, it would have come out through the top of this graph. But a very fortuitous thing happened. We didn't think it was fortuitous at the time. It was anything but that at the time, but it was the Arab oil embargo. And I can remember that you went on even, odd days, the last number on your license plate, and there were long lines at the service stations, and some disagreements occurred in those lines. It was a difficult time for America. But that woke us up.

By the way, this was only a temporary disruption of the supply of oil because they just decided because they did not like our friendship for Israel that they weren't going to ship us the oil. There was plenty of oil to ship us, and we knew it would be there after this temporary crisis.

But it did wake us up. It reminded us that, gee, we had better be somewhat more provident in our use of oil. And so we set about being more efficient in the way we use this energy. A lot of things are more efficient today than they were then, in both the use of oil and electricity. For instance, your air conditioner is probably three times as efficient today as it was then, so you're using less electricity, relatively, now than you were then.

We became more efficient in our use of oil. You notice there was a little recession produced by this Arab oil embargo in the eighties there, and now the growth rate is slower. That's very fortunate because now the reserves that we have will last longer.

Notice that at about 1980, we, for the first time, started using more oil than we found. But no matter, because we have a lot of reserves. You see, everything above this curve represents reserves. All that we have used is what is under the curve, so above the curve represents reserves that we can use. And we cannot find enough to meet today's use, and that's been the situation since these curves crossed back here in about the eighties.

And so now we have been dipping into these reserves back here to find the oil that is above the oil that we've found to meet our demands for it. And by and by, these reserves, of course, will be exhausted. And so this was a prognostication made--when was it made? In about 2004, this prognostication was made that we were going to reach our maximum oil production here in just about this time, isn't it? Just about this time we were going to reach the maximum oil production, and then production of oil would fall off after that.

Now, it's anybody's guess as to how much oil we will find, and we're finding some meaningful fields of oil. If you find a 1 billion field of oil, that's a pretty big field of oil. So where is that on this chart? Well, this is 10 billion here, so 1 billion is way down here, just barely gets off the baseline here.

A really, really big find of oil is 10 billion barrels of oil. That's here.

Well, you can see that the big discoveries that we're finding today are dwarfed by the discoveries that we found a number of years ago. One of these discoveries was the great Ghawar oil field, the granddaddy of all oil fields in Saudi Arabia. It's been pumping oil now for 50 years, and we don't know how many years yet before exhaustion in that field.

By the way, that 10 billion barrels of oil that you find will last our world just exactly 120 days because every 12 days we use a billion barrels of oil. This is about sixth grade arithmetic. We're using about 84 million barrels of oil a day, and if you multiply that by 12, it's about 1,000, and 1,000 million is a billion. So about every 12 days we use a billion barrels of oil. That means that a huge oil discovery today will last the world 120 days.

Now, what happens in the future, you can draw that curve anyway you wish by what you postulate as to what we're going to find. You can actually have that curve going up, and some do, if you think that we're going to find enough oil to make that happen.

But this is the rate at which we've been finding--and remember that these ever-decreasing discoveries have occurred while we've had better and better technologies for finding oil. We had pretty poor technologies back here, but it was near the surface and readily available, so we found an awful lot of it. Now what we find is deep and hard to get at, and we have much better technologies for finding. So in spite of these improved technologies for finding oil, we have been finding less and less and less oil.

The next chart shows us what happened in our country and what is happening today in our country. I need to get a more recent one of these charts because it will show a little bit of a pick-up here at the end due to the Bakken oil. But this is the production of oil in our country.

Whenever I present this chart, I generally talk about the prognostications of the person I think gave the most important speech of the last century. It wasn't recognized then, and I think shortly now it will be recognized that the speech given by M. King Hubbert on the 8th day of March, 1956, was the most important speech in the last century. It was given to a group of oil people in San Antonio, Texas; and he made what was then an absolutely audacious prediction.

The speech was given in 1956, and here we are in 1956, and this is the amount of oil that we're producing. Oh, the orange on top here is natural gas liquids--that won't be in your gas tank; it is propane and butane and things like that--and oil from Texas and oil from the rest of the United States. But the total here is the line that we're interested in, and this is where we were in 1956.

You have to put this in context as to where we were as a country. The United States was king of oil. We were producing more oil, we were using more oil, we were exporting more oil than any other country in the world.

M. King Hubbert said that, in just about 14 years, right around 1970, the United States will reach its maximum oil production. From then on, no matter what you do, the production of oil will fall off. We don't have time today, but we may, at another time, go into how he made those predictions and why he was relatively certain that he was correct in making those predictions.

No one else had done that. And because we had always found huge amounts of oil, more than we were using, he was relegated to the lunatic fringe. And when in 1970 it happened, and when you were at 1980 and looked back, you really knew that it happened, didn't you, because you could look back and say, wow, 1970 was the peak, wasn't it? We're falling off the peak now, so M. King Hubbert was right.

Now, he did not include in his predictions oil from Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico because he looked at only the lower 48. You notice that that huge find in Alaska, we have a 4-foot pipeline up there, I've been up there where the pipeline begins, and we are producing about a fourth of all the oil in our country that flowed through that pipeline.

So it made a little blip here in the downhill slide. Then you remember not all that many years ago those fabled discoveries and production of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. You see it here. It's the little yellow here that made barely a ripple in the top line.

Well, this is the experience of the United States. Today we have drilled more oil wells than all the rest of the world put together. We're the most creative, innovative society in the world. We could not reverse this decline that M. King Hubbert said was going to happen.

He also predicted that at just about this time, the world would be reaching its maximum oil production.

Now, if the United States, if we, with all of our creativity and innovation, could not reverse this decline, when the world reaches this top point, which is called by most people peak oil, from which point you go down the other side, if we could not reverse that, what chances do you think there are that the world will do what we could not do? I think most people believe that we probably can do more, better than the rest of the world.

This is a chart of a couple or so years ago. These are the data from two entities that do the world's best job of tracking the production and consumption, which are essentially the same thing, of oil. This is the International Energy Association, a creature of the OECD in Europe, and the Energy Information Administration, a part of our own Department of Energy. These are their two curves here. You can see that they are very similar.

The caption up here says ``Peak Oil: Are We There Yet?'' Because they appeared to be leveling out. Now, this chart was drawn when oil was a bit under $100 a barrel. You remember if we extended this out a little, it went to $147 a barrel. These curves did not go up. We're roughly here at 84, 85 or so million barrels of oil a day or so. That's where we've been for 5 years now.

With increasing demand and no more supply, the price finally went up to $147 a barrel, and the economy with some help by the housing crisis in our country, came crashing down and oil dropped down to I think a bit below $40 a barrel. This has been a steady climb as the economy picked up from that time on, and oil, as you know now, is about $100 a barrel.

The next chart here, and I want you to remember this one because you're not going to find it on the Internet when you go there. These both appeared on the Internet. It's where we got them. These are charts produced by the IEA, the International Energy Association. This was called the World Energy Outlook. This top one here they did in 2008. I want you to note some interesting things about this chart.

The dark blue here is the production of oil, what we call conventional oil. If we went back to the other side of the Chamber here and started 100 years ago, you'd start at zero and then it would come up and up and up, slowly up, always producing just the amount of oil that the world wanted to use because it was the era and we could produce it.

So, we always met the demands for the use of oil in the world. It was 10 cents a barrel when it started, and within fairly recent memory it was $10 a barrel, really pretty cheap compared to $100 a barrel, isn't it?

So, they're saying that now this conventional oil that we've been pumping is going to reach a peak here. We reached that peak in our country in 1970, remember. After we reach that

peak, it's now going to fall off. It's now going to go down the other side.

We're now producing total liquid--we say it's oil but some of it is natural gas liquids--about 84 million barrels a day. The top orange here is natural gas liquids. The green here is unconventional oil. That's oil like the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. That is really sticky stuff. They have a shovel that lifts 100 tons, dumps it in a truck that holds 400 tons, and then they cook it with some what we call stranded natural gas. That's natural gas where there's not a lot of people so there's not a big demand for it. We say it's stranded so it's quite cheap. They use that for heating and softening this oil. Then they put some solvents in it so that it will remain a liquid so that they can pump it.

The dark little red one up here, now it really should be a part of the blue one down here because it's simply enhanced oil recovery. It's squeezing a little bit more out of conventional oil by pumping live steam down there or seawater, as they do in Saudi Arabia, or CO2 to get some more oil out of it.

They're prognosticating that by 2030 that we're going to be producing 106 million barrels of oil a day, and that's going to be possible in spite of this falloff in the production from our conventional sources because there's going to be huge productions that come from the fields that we have now discovered, the light blue here, but too tough to develop, and the red ones, fields yet to be discovered.

These represent pretty big wedges, and I want you to look at the relative magnitude of these wedges to the amount of oil that they said we would be producing from our conventional wells by 2030.

Now, 2 years later in 2010, they produced the chart on the bottom. There are several interesting things about this. They reversed the two things on top. They're exactly the same things. They have different colors and they've reversed them. This is unconventional oil, and this is natural gas liquids. They've now incorporated the enhanced oil recovery up here where it should have been, and the conventional oil. Notice now they're showing even a more precipitous dropoff, and now they go out to 2035.

Reality is setting in because now 5 years later, 5 years beyond this, they are not producing 106 million barrels a day. They say now the production will only be 96 million barrels a day.

But to get to that 96 million barrels a day, you have to postulate huge wedges in here from developing fields that we've discovered now but are hard to develop, like one in the Gulf of Mexico under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock, and the darker blue here, fields yet to be discovered.

Now, we were at this tipping point in 1970, and there is nothing we did in our country that kept this top curve going up. I have a lot of trouble understanding why people believe that the world will be able to do what we could not do. Notice these huge wedges that are supposed to be produced by just 2035. That's not very long from now, is it? I think that there is little probability that these wedges will be produced.

I think what's going to happen is that the world will do what the United States did. That this will tip over and the total production of oil worldwide will decrease.

The next chart is a very recent chart from the Deutsche Bank, and this shows the growth in oil production capacity versus demand. This is not how much we're producing. This is the growth in how much we're producing.

They think this chart tells a grim story. I think it tells an even grimmer story because I don't think we're going to have any increase in production. I hope we do. But we have not for 5 years now. I think we're stuck at where we are. Even if we have this increase in production, this is the increase in demand, and they say that an increase in demand is going to fall 20 percent short of the production.

Notice where most of that demand is. Red. Red China. That's where most of the increase in demand is.

China last year used 6 percent more oil than it did the year before. Worldwide, there was no more oil than there was the year before. So where did China get that oil? Well, we use less. We used to use, what, 21 million barrels a day? Now we're at 18\1/2\ million barrels a day. We are driving less. We're driving more efficient cars. There are more people in the HOV lane.

Our military really has had a very aggressive and very successful program to be more energy efficient because energy is a huge part of their cost. If it goes up just a dollar a barrel, they have millions of dollars more cost in the military.

So for a lot of reasons, we've been more efficient in our country. Good news, because that meant that China could have more oil to use and the price didn't go above $100 a barrel.

Let me show you the next chart here, and this one I think, is a very interesting chart that kind of puts this in a worldwide perspective. The world is going to seem to be turned upside down with this.

This is what the world would look like if the size of the country were relative to how much oil it had. We see some very interesting things here.

Wow, Saudi Arabia dominates the planet in oil, doesn't it?--and it does. About 22 percent of all of the known reserves of oil in the world are in Saudi Arabia.

Look at little Kuwait, a tiny, little thing that looked to Saddam Hussein like a province that ought to belong to Iraq, and he went down there to take it. You remember that war. Look at Iraq and how much oil is there. Then Iran. Iran is pretty big.

In our hemisphere, Venezuela dwarfs everything else. They have more oil than everybody else put together in our hemisphere.

Here we are, the United States. We have only 2 percent of the reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the oil in the world. Guess who our No. 1 importer is. It's Canada.

Look at Canada. Canada has even less oil than we do, but they don't have very many people, so they can export the oil.

Until fairly recently, Mexico was our No. 2 importer. They also have less oil than we do. They have a lot of people, but they're too poor to use the oil, so they can export it to us. The second largest oil field in the world, the Cantarell oil field, was in Mexico. It is now in rapid decline by something like 20 percent a year, so now Mexico is our No. 3 importer, and Saudi Arabia is our No. 2 importer of oil.

I want you to look at Europe. Boy, you need a magnifying glass to find it over here, don't you? This is Europe. It's bigger than we are in terms of an economy but with very little oil. It's really dependent on these huge supplies of oil from the Middle East.

Russia, spanning 11 time zones up there, is not all that big. They're the world's, I think, No. 1 producer of oil now because they're pumping really hard in their oil fields. They have a lot of oil, and it will last for a while but nowhere near as long as that of Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Iran.

By the way, as to Iran, if the current increase in use rate and if the current production rates remain the same, those curves will cross within less than a decade, and Iran will be an oil importer. That is also true of Mexico, by the way. They're going to be an oil importer within a decade. If you look at the rate of increase in the use of oil and in the production of oil, those curves will cross in less than a decade.

The real alarming picture occurs when you look at China and India over there. They're tiny, little countries in this world according to oil--China with 1.3 billion people, India with over 1 billion people and with very little oil. What is China doing about this? China is buying up oil all over the world. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. It's a bit less now since we slowed down a little, but it has been 25 percent of the world's oil, two-thirds or more of which we import, and we're not buying oil anywhere.

Why wouldn't the nation that uses the most oil and has, relative to its use, the least be buying oil somewhere else? Well, there is no need to buy the oil. It doesn't matter who owns it, because the person who gets it is the person who comes with the dollars and buys the oil--and let's hope it stays dollars at the global petroleum auction.

So why isn't China content to just take their money--and they've got a lot of it. Why don't they just take their money and buy the oil? I think that they understand that there will be a shortage of oil in the future--and I

hope I'm wrong in this prediction--and that China may one day say that they can't share that oil. This is going to create some huge geopolitical tensions in the world.

What does all of this mean?

This means that we have a huge challenge in our country. This is good news to me because I think that we can, once again, become an exporting country and that we can create millions of jobs with the green technology that produces the alternatives that inevitably will occur. One day, we will produce as much energy as we use in this country. Geology will assure that that happens.

I hope that we get there through a really winning economy when we recognize that we have to rise to this challenge. I think America with its creativity and innovation can create the technologies and the products it will sell worldwide to help us in this huge challenge that we face with a limited supply of oil and the ever-increasing growth in the need for oil.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 2 o'clock and 14 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, February 13, 2012, at 1 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, as the representative of the Sixth District of Maryland and a proud graduate of the University of Maryland, I commend your attention to the University of Maryland's recently retired mens' basketball coach, Gary Williams.

Gary Williams started for three years and was team captain of the Terps during his senior year at the University of Maryland before he graduated in 1968. As a graduate student in 1969, he began his coaching career at the University of Maryland.

After great success as a coach at other colleges, Gary Williams leaped at the chance to be the Terp's head coach in 1989 though the team was battered by setbacks. Fighting back tears at his first news conference, Gary explained, ``I never thought I'd have the opportunity to come back and coach at Maryland because . . . you very rarely get the opportunity to do that.''

Only one other coach in history engineered a greater win-loss turnaround during his first year than Gary Williams at UMD. Gary is one of only seven college basketball coaches since 1980 to guide his alma mater to the Final Four and the first since 1974 to lead his alma mater to a national title--which he did in 2002. Gary Williams also led his teams to seven victories over top-ranked opponents--more than any other coach in history. Though retired as a coach, Gary Williams is continuing to work at the University of Maryland.

Gary Williams, thank you. Your loyalty to our beloved University of Maryland, your integrity, and your example of dedication to the pursuit of excellence on and off the basketball court sets an example that all Americans can be proud of and should emulate.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Oil is about $100 a barrel. We're in a recession. The United States, just a couple of years ago, used 22 million barrels of oil a day. Now we're using less than 19 million barrels of oil a day, and still oil is $100 a barrel in the middle of a recession. We are also producing more oil in our country than we did last year for the first time since 1970. The production of oil has increased this last year. Every year before that, the production of oil was lower than it was the preceding year. Now, with Bakken oil, we're producing a bit more than we did last year.

So why, with increased oil production and decreased oil use in the middle of a recession, should oil still be $100 a barrel?

This is really hurting our economy. It increases the cost of just about everything we use because, if you've got it, a truck probably brought it, and the increased fuel cost increases the cost of just about everything, therefore, that we have.

I believe the most important speech given in the last century was given in 1956 on the 8th day of March in San Antonio, Texas, by an oil geologist known as M. King Hubbard. We need to put his speech in context. At that time, the United States was king of oil. We produced more oil. We used more oil. We exported more oil than any other country in the world.

On this 8th day of March in 1956, M. King Hubbard made an astounding prediction. He said that in just 14 years, the United States would reach its maximum oil production. He wasn't sure what that number would be. But he made the prediction that we would reach our maximum production in 1970, just 14 years later, and no matter what we did, it would continue to go down after that. And from 1970 until about a year or so ago, that was true.

Here I have a chart that shows what has happened to oil production in our country. A whole lot of it comes from Texas, as you can see from the lower dark blue below, and the rest of the United States is the lighter blue above.

The kind of orange here is natural gas liquids. That's not in your gas tanks. That's propane and butane and chemicals like that.

M. King Hubbard made his predictions using only the contiguous 48. He didn't include Alaska, and he didn't include the Gulf of Mexico in his predictions. He made that prediction in 1956, about here. In 1970, as you can see here, we reached our maximum production in the lower 48, and it went down pretty consistently after that. Then we found oil in Alaska, a lot of it. And there was a little blip on the way down when you add that to the oil to the rest of the United States and Texas. And then a little later were the fabled discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. And you can see what that did--you can hardly see the blip there. A lot of oil, but we use a lot of oil.

The world uses 1 billion barrels of oil every 12 days. It's pretty simple arithmetic: 84 million barrels a day by about 12; that's 1,000 million, which is 1 billion barrels of oil every 12 days.

Oh, by the way, the M. King Hubbard that predicted that the United States was going to peak in 1970--of course he became a legend in his own time because he lived well beyond that, and he was exactly right. Relegated to the lunatic fringe for maybe 15 years or so, he became a celebrity after his predictions came true.

And he predicted that what happened to the United States had to happen to the world. Oil is finite. One day, it will run out. One day, we will reach our maximum production, after which it will tail off in the world, just as it did in the United States.

Now if you think that, collectively, the world is brighter and cleverer, and so forth, than the United States, then you might think that that won't happen. I think that we are the most creative, innovative society in the world. And if we couldn't turn it around, I think it's unlikely the world is going to turn it around.

Well, here is a chart from just a few years ago: Peak oil, this is a plateau. The maximum production is called peak oil. And the question was asked, Are we there yet? Because you see, these curves have flattened out. These are from the two entities that do the best job of cataloging the production and use of oil, the EIA and the IEA. It's the same three letters of the alphabet turned a bit. One is a creature of the OECD, and the other is a part of our Department of Energy.

They both, as you see, had a plateau here. And look what happened to the price of oil. Now this was a little bit before it peaked at $147 a barrel and the economy collapsed, along with the housing market. That was kind of a double whammy, with both the housing market and the price of oil at $147 a barrel. When the economy came tumbling down, oil dropped to something under $40 a barrel, and it has steadily climbed since then up to now around $100 a barrel, where it has been for several months now.

Are we there yet? Well, just recently we've had two charts produced by one of those entities, the IEA, the International Energy Agency. This is called the World Energy Outlook. The chart on top here is from 2008, and the one on the bottom is from 2010. Now if you look at their Web site, you're going to have trouble finding the chart from 2008. They have purged their Web site of that chart. And in a few moments, you will understand why they purged it.

Let's look at that chart. This dark blue is conventional oil. That's what we looked at before in the production of the United States. And it's been going up now for a very long time. If you started back here 150 years ago at zero, and then we pumped more and more and more. And now the total liquids--not all of it oil; some of it is natural gas liquids--are up to about 84 million barrels of oil a day.

Now they are predicting just exactly what M. King Hubbard predicted, and that is that there would be a peak, and after that peak, it would fall off. And you see, they are predicting a fairly dramatic falloff in the production of oil from the fields that we are now exploiting.

But predicting out to 2030, they believe that by then, we will have a total liquid fuels production of about 106 million barrels of oil a day that will be made up of increasing amounts of natural gas liquids. And that will happen. We have found a lot of natural gas, so those will increase.

The green here is nonconventional oil. That's going to also increase. That's oil like the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, that won't flow. You have to lift it with a 100-ton shovel and put it in a truck that hauls 400 tons. And then you cook it into what we call stranded natural gas. That is natural gas where there aren't very many people to use it. So it's kind of stranded, so its price is less. So you can afford to cook this oil with it. And that's going to grow too some.

And then they make two predictions here. That this light blue is production from fields that we've found but are too difficult to develop, like a field found in the Gulf of Mexico under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock. I heard a number. I have no idea how you get this precise. But it was said that when oil was $111 a barrel, they could afford to develop this field. So this is projected production from fields that we have found but are, with the current price of oil, too difficult to develop, uneconomically feasible to develop.

And then the bright red here are fields yet to be discovered. The dark red here really belongs as a part of the oil down here. It's a little bit of additional conventional oil we've gotten by what we have called enhanced oil recovery. That's pumping some live steam down there or pumping some CO2 down there or, in Saudi Arabia, pushing some seawater down there. And some of their wells now are producing seven times as much seawater as oil, but it's okay because they can separate the seawater from the oil.

Okay, two things about this chart: Note the falloff in production from conventional fields, and note that by 2030, 106 million barrels of oil a day projected--that's what the world is going to be producing. Just 2 years later, in 2010, reality is setting in--that's the lower chart down here--reality is setting in. Now they are up by 35, 5 years later, now they're up to only 96 million barrels of oil a day, not 106 million barrels of oil a day. This is 5 years later, when it really should have been higher.

These top two curves here have been reversed and the colors different, but they are exactly the same thing. This is unconventional oil and this is natural gas liquids. Notice the precipitous decline in production from our current fields. And this includes, by the way, the enhanced oil recovery. You see it is in this chart, but it doesn't exist in this one because they have now incorporated and included where it belongs, and it is part of the conventional fields where we are now pumping from.

Here they show two huge wedges. To keep this production going up slightly, they show two huge wedges here. Notice how considerably bigger they are than the ones they projected just 2 years earlier.

I don't think that these two wedges are going to occur. They did not occur in the United States. Now today we have technologies that we didn't have there, like horizontal drilling and fracking. So we can get more out of a field than we could then, and we are going to go down and get some more oil out of fields that we thought were exhausted with this new technology.

When you find a field that produces 10 billion barrels of oil, that is a big field. We have not found very many fields that produce 10 billion barrels of oil. That will last the world 120 days. Every 12 days, we use a billion barrels of oil.

Now, I think you can see why you can no longer find this projection they made in 2008 in their Web site, because it is just not consistent with the reality that they are forced to use in projecting here just last year, in 2010.

I will be enormously surprised if these two wedges occur. There is little evidence that they should occur. They did not occur in our country. Unless you think the world is incredibly more capable than the United States, then you will have some doubts whether those two wedges will occur or not.

If they don't, this top curve is going to tip over for the world just exactly the way it did for the United States. We're not running out of oil. Many people who are disparaging, people who talk about peak oil will say that the peak oil people say we're running out of oil. We're not running out of oil.

There is a lot of oil out there. There is more oil out there to be pumped than all of the oil that we have pumped in the last 150 years. What we're running out of is our ability to pump that oil as fast as we would like to use it.

This next chart is an interesting one. It kind of puts what we're talking about in perspective--the world according to oil. This is what the world would look like if the size of the country was relative to how much oil reserves it had.

You see here that Saudi Arabia kind of dominates the planet. They do for oil reserves. They have, we believe, maybe about 22 percent of all the reserves in all the world. Now, we aren't quite sure of that because a Wikipedia leak a few months ago indicated that they may have 40 percent less oil than they've said.

Let me explain what happened back when OPEC could produce more oil than the world needed and increased production would drive down prices. And so they had an agreement in the OPEC nations that you could pump a certain percentage of your reserves. So if you were a country that needed some more revenue, you simply had more reserves. And without finding any new oil, you can look back through history and see that some of them magically had maybe twice the reserves that they had. They didn't find any new fields; they just said they had twice the reserves in the fields they already had. Then you see, they could pump more oil. None of these OPEC nations will let our technical people in to look at their records so we really don't know how much oil they have, but we believe that it is relatively like this.

You see little Kuwait looms huge on the world scene in terms of how much oil they have. Iraq, Iran, huge amounts of oil. Venezuela really dominates our hemisphere, doesn't it. It's bigger than all of the rest of the countries put together in terms of oil reserves.

And here we are, the United States. We have 2 percent of the reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, a little less now because our cars get a little better mileage and our economy is down a little so we're using a little less, but roughly 25 percent of the world's oil.

Our number one importer is Canada. They have less oil than we, but they don't have very many people up there to use it, so they can export it to us.

Until a couple of years ago, our number two importer of oil was Mexico. They also have less than us. Now, they have a lot of people, but their people are too poor to use the oil so they can export it. Just a few years ago, the second largest oil field in the world, the Cantarell oil field in Mexico, started in rapid decline, declining as much as 20 percent a year in production. So now Mexico is our number three importer and Saudi Arabia is now our number two. Mexico has been displaced by Saudi Arabia.

Look at China and India over there. Tiny. China with a 1.3 billion people, India with well over a billion people, with an economy in China that's growing--well, in a recession; they've slumped. They were 16 percent growth, and now I think they are something like 8 percent growth, and India is not far behind them. With a static oil production of 84 million barrels a day, and China last year used 6 percent more oil than they did the year before, where is it coming from? We used less. We used to be 22 million barrels a day; now we're less than 19 million barrels a day. And some of the poorer countries of the world just can't afford the oil so they are doing without.

This disparity between the people who are using the oil and the people who have the oil is going to set up some huge geopolitical tensions in the world. China last year sold more cars than we sold, and that curve is accelerating. China is now the number one polluter in the world. They just passed us. China is buying up oil all over the world. I wonder why.

We have only 2 percent of the oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the oil in the world, and we're not buying oil anywhere. We don't need to because all you need to do is go to the global oil auction and have enough money and be the high bidder or participate at the bid price, and you get all the oil that you need if there's enough to meet everybody's needs. So why is China buying oil? They aren't just buying oil; they're buying goodwill: you need a hospital, soccer field, roads.

Simultaneous with buying oil reserves all over the world, China is also aggressively building a blue-water navy. They soon will have more ships than we. They aren't our ships yet by a long shot, but this year they will graduate seven times as many engineers as we graduate, and about half of our engineering students are Chinese mostly and some India students.

We can't for long have that disparity between the graduates of engineers and our two countries and we continue to be the world's premier economic and military power. We have got to do something to capture the imagination of our people and encourage our young people to go into careers of science, math, and engineering.

Let me tell you what I think may happen; I hope it doesn't. Why would China buy oil while they're simultaneously very aggressively building a blue-water navy and building capabilities for denial. There is now-- look it up--a Chinese anti-ship missile that we essentially have no defense against. It travels 1,200 miles. There's no reason they can't put it on a ship, which means you couldn't get within 1,200 miles of a Chinese ship that had this missile on it unless we developed some defense against that missile.

Let's hope the time does not come when China says, hey, guys, I'm sorry, but we have 1.3 billion people. We have 900 million people in rural areas that, through the miracle of communications, know the benefits of an industrialized society, and they're saying, hey, guys, what about us? And our empire may unravel if we don't meet the needs of those people, so we can't share our oil. It's ours, we bought it, we can't share it, and we've got to have it. That would plunge the rest of the world into a recession, and China then would have to look to their population as consumers for the goods that they produce. And 1.3 billion people could be a pretty big consuming population.

The tragedy is that your government has paid for four different studies, two of them issuing in '05 and two of them in '07, that said the same thing, the peaking of oil is either present or imminent with potentially devastating consequences. Your government chose to ignore those four studies because it was not politically expedient to admit that we had a problem of those proportions.

Now, we should have known that those predictions were coming because a very wise man in what, I think, was the most insightful speech of the last century, M. King Hubbert, gave the most important speech. I think that Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, gave the most insightful speech just about a year later. I don't know if these two men knew each other, but on the 15th day of May in 1957 to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hyman Rickover gave a speech that was lost until a few years ago, and now you can find it on the Internet. Just Google for ``Rickover'' and ``energy speech'' and it will come up.

He said some things there that should have been self-evident, and everyone should have been saying it; but it took Hyman Rickover to say the obvious. There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fuel reserves. They are finite. The Moon is not made out of green cheese; the Earth is not made out of oil. One day, it will be gone. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.

In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways to live off renewable energy--you've heard of renewable energy--or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes that we can expect from such a shift.

Have you noticed we've been doing that? I haven't. I love this last quote here because I think it pretty well describes where we are and what we're doing.

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.

Drill, baby, drill. And the unspoken part of that mantra is the hell with our

kids and our grandkids, let them shift for themselves.

I remember when the Vice President came and asked me if I would vote to drill in ANWR, and I said I would be happy to do that when you commit--this was Dick Cheney--that you're going to use all the revenues you get from ANWR to invest in alternatives, because we're way late in doing what Hyman Rickover said we needed to do in 1957.

I noted that we were going to leave our kids a huge debt. It's bigger now than I thought it would be then. I said, wouldn't it be nice to leave them a little oil?

Here is a quote from one of those studies. This was the first and the biggest of those studies, the so-called Hirsch, SAIC, big study: world oil peaking is going to happen, world production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum was called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade. It has happened. Others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult. He says that oil peaking presents a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this. It is an unprecedented problem that the world faces.

I have a last chart here that I think kind of helps us to put this in perspective. And this shows the production of oil, and this chart is a few years old. We need to have it updated. But this is when oil was discovered, way back in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. This is the use of oil.

By the way, tonight when you do your prayers, thank the Islamic world for the oil price spike hikes in the 70s. Look what it did. It woke us up. If they hadn't awakened us and this curve continued, we would be through the top of the chart by now. Up until the Carter years, it was a stunning statistic. Every 10 years we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Now look at the slope of that curve. It is much lower than that.

Our time is running out, and I must yield back; but I will come to the floor again soon, and we'll spend quite some time looking at this chart. Because if you had only one chart to look at where you were going to predict what you thought might happen in the future, I think this would be the chart, because you look back through history and see what has happened, and then you'll make a judgment. Wow, are we going to find that much more oil in the future that we found back here even with our increased capability to find oil? Yeah, we're going to find more, and we're going to pump more, but I think there is little or no chance that we'll be able to produce that oil fast enough to meet the growing demands of the world.

I love challenges. This is a huge challenge. And I think that facing this challenge we can produce more jobs; we can be an exporter of the technologies for green energy. I just feel challenged by this, Mr. Speaker, and I hope Americans feel the same way.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 45 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 8, 2012, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Office of the Clerk,

House of Representatives,

Washington, DC, February 7, 2012.

To: Trudi Terry, Chief Clerk, Office of Official Reporters

From: Karen L. Haas, Clerk

Subject: Oath of Office

In compliance with the provisions of 2 U.S.C. 25, please have printed in the appropriate place of the House section of the Congressional Record of Tuesday, February 7, 2012, the following entry related to those Members who have executed the Oath of Office:

Thank you very much for yielding.

I sat and listened to this discussion, and I am reminded of how futile efforts are to try to get something done by doing it wrong two different ways.

The President believes that we need higher CAFE standards, and he is going to impose those through regulations from the EPA. He is also assuming that the American people don't have the sense to understand that they need to have higher CAFE standards, so he is going to force them on them. Without trying to educate the American people, he is just going to tell them you need to trust me, you need higher CAFE standards, and this is what it is going to be. What the President is doing is illegal and ill-logical, and I don't think that the American people are going to stand for it.

I just have a couple of charts here that put in context why we need to look at CAFE standards. If the President would use this approach, the American people would do the right thing relative to the kind of car they buy when they understand the environment that the United States and the world is in.

Here I have two charts and they are from the IEA, the International Energy Association. This is a creature of the OECD. It is perhaps, maybe along with our Energy Information Administration, a part of our Department of Energy, the best followers and prognosticators of energy in the world. This is their world-energy outlook.

This one is in 2008. I just want to point to a couple of things here. First of all, the oil that we are now pumping--and you could go back here 150 years with this blue thing here. It started back at zero, and it pumped more and more and more and more. Here we are today pumping this much oil. These are the conventional oil fields that we are pumping oil from now. We are also getting some natural gas liquids, and you see that curve is growing and growing. This is not gas in your gas tank. This is propane and butane and gases like that.

The green here is nonconventional oil. We are having a lot of discussion of nonconventional oil now about the Keystone pipeline and bringing the oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. We are going to build a pipeline. It is either going to be in this country, or it is going to be across Canada through the Rocky Mountains. If the environmentalists are worried about environmental impact, they ought to be thinking about what is going to happen to

the environment when they put a pipeline through the Rocky Mountains.

Either we're going to get that cheap oil, or the Chinese are going to get that cheap oil. They're going to have a pipeline. We're not going to avoid a pipeline. There's going to be a pipeline.

I just think that commonsense comes down on the side of, gee, I would like that oil, I would like the jobs that go with getting that oil. And I am concerned about the environment, but there is going to be a pipeline. That is a given. It is either going to be here, or it is going to be in Canada. I think it is going to be more of an environmental insult going through the Rocky Mountains than down through the Mississippi Valley with that pipeline.

That green area is nonconventional oil, and that is increasing. It will increase. You see it is not a big fraction of what we get. Notice that we have been stagnated here for 5 years now at 84 million barrels. We call it oil, but it is more than oil because it is natural gas liquids too. The world has not been able to produce any more oil than 84 million barrels a day, which is why oil is about $100 a barrel and we are in a recession, and it is still stuck at about $100 a barrel.

They prognosticate that the production from current fields is going to go down fairly dramatically. You see it dropping off there. Not to worry, because we are going to get a lot of oil from the fields that we discovered, the light blue here that are too tough to develop. Then we are going to get a fair amount of oil from fields we have yet to discover, the bright red there. This is kind of a nice dream, isn't it? By the way, the dark red here is enhanced oil recovery. It really ought to be a part of this. That is putting CO2 down there or live steam or something down there to get a little bit more oil out.

Note that by 2030 they are prognosticating that we are going to be up at 106 million barrels of oil a day. This chart has disappeared. If you go on the Internet and try to find that chart, it is not there. It was there. That's where we got it. They're a little embarrassed by its presence because just 2 years later in 2010, they made this prognostication, the same people. By 2035, 5 years later, instead of having 106 million barrels a day, they are up to only 96 million barrels of oil a day.

Notice they've now incorporated the enhanced oil recovery here with conventional oil and notice a fairly precipitous drop-off. Now they're telling you that the production of oil is not going to decrease because we're going to get huge amounts of oil from the fields that we have now discovered that are too tough to develop like under 7,000 feet of water and 30,000 feet of rock in the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of discoveries like that, and fields yet to be discovered.

I think there is little probability that these two wedges are going to occur. I think what's going to happen is that this curve is going to tip over and start down. Let me tell you why I think that's true.

Because the United States reached its plateau, which is called ``peak oil,'' in 1970, and that was predicted in 1956 in what I think was the most important speech in the last century, given by M. King Hubbert in 1956. He says, 14 years from now, in 1970, the United States will reach its maximum oil production. After that, it will drop off. It did.

Now, he didn't predict the discovery of any oil in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska, and here we see there was a little blip in the slide down with the huge amounts of oil we found in Alaska. Remember the fabled discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the yellow there. That's all it did.

We now produce half the oil that we did in 1970. I do not think the world is any more resourceful or creative than the United States. If we could not reverse this downtrend in our country, I do not think that the world will be able to reverse it worldwide, which is why I say that the world is going to follow the United States. By the way, this was predicted by M. King Hubbert. He said that the world would be peaking about now.

Your government has paid for four studies that said this is going to happen. I quote here from one of those studies. This was the first big study. This was the SAIC report called the Hirsch report.

World oil peaking is going to happen, they said. Peaking is when you reach this plateau, and after that, it falls off. They said the peaking of oil is going to happen. Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. The world has never faced a problem like this.

I just have one more chart here, and these are some quotes from what I think is the most insightful speech of the last century. The most important one I think was given by M. King Hubbert on March 6, 1956. This speech was given just a bit later, the 15th day of May in 1957, a speech given by Hyman Rickover, the creator of our nuclear submarines:

``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: The longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways of living off of renewable or substitute energy sources''--we've been trying to do that, haven't we?--``and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.''

By the way, this talk was given to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you simply Google for ``Rickover energy speech,'' his speech will come up. They lost it for several years. It's now back on the Internet.

In another place in this speech he said, in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip. And, wow, what a ride it's been. The quality of life that we have as a result of using these fossil fuels has just been incredible.

Just one last quote from what I think was the most insightful speech of the last century. I love this quote:

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and

responsible parent will use this capital sparingly in order

to pass on to his children as much as possible of his

inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander

it in riotous living and care not one wit how his offspring

will fare.

I think what our President needs to do is educate the American people to the situation we're in. If these charts truly represent that situation, the American people will voluntarily say, Mr. President, we need to respond to that in a responsible way. The President doesn't need to assume that you're ignorant and can't understand or assume that he has to tell us what we ought to do.

I rise in support of the conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012. This is the 50th consecutive conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act.

I have the honor of serving as the chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee of our Armed Services Committee. Under the full committee leadership of Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Smith, the support of Silvestre Reyes, our subcommittee's ranking member, and a superb staff, ours is truly a bipartisan effort.

Consideration of this conference report comes at a critical period for our Nation and our military. World events and the Nation's fiscal circumstances have challenged our government's will and capacity to constructively address the enormity of the challenges we face. We need to develop a new national military strategy that better reflects the current and projected threat and fiscal environment. This is needed to facilitate full and balanced consideration of force structure and equipment investment plans and programs.

Our first priority and immediate requirement is to fully support our personnel serving overseas in Afghanistan and the many other countries where we have asked them to serve under the daily, constant threat to their personal survival. This conference report properly reflects this immediate requirement.

The National Defense Authorization Act Conference Report authorizes an additional $325 million for National Guard and Reserve equipment unfunded requirements; $3 billion is provided to support urgent operational needs and to counter improvised explosive device activities; $2.7 billion is provided to support Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle modernization and survivability enhancements; and $2.4 billion is provided for Army and Marine Corps Tactical Wheeled Vehicles, including $155 million for development of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

To meet projected future needs, an additional $255 million is provided to support the Abrams Tank industrial base and National Guard tank modernization, increasing the request of 21 to 70 tank upgrades, avoiding a production break in the tank upgrade program; $8.5 billion is provided for F-35 multiservice aircraft; $3.2 billion is provided for 40 aircraft in two models of F-18 aircraft; $2.4 billion is provided for V-22 Ospreys for the Marine Corps and the Air Force; and multiyear procurement is authorized for various models of Army and Navy H-60 helicopters.

I urge all of my colleagues to support this conference report.

Mr. Speaker, on the 8th day of March, 1956, a scientist, geologist by the name of M. King Hubbert spoke to an audience in San Antonio, Texas. The audience was a bunch of oil people. He gave what I think is going to be recognized as the most important speech of the last century. It was really a very audacious speech. At that time, the United States was King of Oil. We produced more oil, we sold more oil, and we consumed more oil than any nation in the world.

M. King Hubbert told that group of oil geologists and company executives that in just 14 short years the United States would reach its maximum oil production, that no matter what they did after that their oil production would decline. This was an incredible speech. Essentially no one believed it because, as I say, at that time the United States was the King of Oil, producing more, shipping more, consuming more than any other nation in the world.

For a number of years, M. King Hubbert was a pariah. Nobody believed him. He was kind of relegated to the lunatic fringe. In 1980, 10 years after his prediction that the United States would reach its maximum oil production, you could look back, and what you saw is shown on this chart. This, of course, goes out beyond that year. What you see is what happened then.

The United States did reach its maximum oil production in 1970. After that, the production fell off no matter what we did. Now, there was a little blip on the downside because we found a lot of oil in Alaska. You can see it there on the chart. And we found a lot of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the yellow that you see there. There was a little blip on the down slope, and M. King Hubbert had not included in his predictions the oil that we would find in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. He included only the lower 48.

This chart shows where that oil came from. A lot of it came from Texas, the biggest single source of oil. The first oil, of course, was found in Pennsylvania and part of the rest of the USA. Then you have natural gas liquids on the top. As we found and used more and more natural gas, the natural gas liquids increased. That's not gas in your gas tank. That's propane and butane and things like that.

This is something that could have hardly been believed. How could a country as creative and innovative as the United States possibly not be able to continue to produce more and more oil when they needed more and more oil?

What M. King Hubbert did was a pretty simple thing. Oil had been pumped for long enough--50 years or so--by that time that they had some idea of what went on in a field, and the production in an individual oil field followed kind of a bell-shaped curve. As you pumped the field, you got more and more; and then when you reached the top, it became harder and harder to get the oil, and so it fell off as you went down the other side of the bell curve.

And so what he reasoned was, if I can make some estimate of how many oil fields there will be in the United States and I add up all those little oil fields, all those little bell curves, I'll get a big bell curve, and that will tell me when we're going to reach our maximum production in the United States.

Just about a year later, another speech was given. I don't know if these two gentlemen knew each other at all. But this other speech was given by the father of our nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover. Hyman Rickover spoke to a group of physicians. The audience is irrelevant. He spoke to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he said something that should have been self-evident, but obviously they weren't because nobody else was saying them and nobody has said them much since then.

What he said in this speech was that in the 8,000-year recorded history of man, the age of oil would be but a blip, and he referred to it as this ``golden age.'' Here are a few quotes from that speech.

By the way, you can find it on the Internet. If you simply Google for Rickover and energy speech, it will come up. It was lost for a number of years, and a few years ago it was found and put on the Internet. And what he says here seems to be axiomatic.

``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy,'' he says, ``500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.

``In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuels are finite''--they will run out--``the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.''

Now, this would seem to be, as I said, axiomatic. Obviously, the Moon isn't

made out of green cheese and the Earth isn't made out of oil. It is finite. One day it will run out. And so it is obvious that one day one will have to come to grips with this. You will have to find alternative energy sources. Just when is that time for the world?

When we ran out of our ability to produce more oil when we wanted more oil was in 1970. But the United States was the first great industrialized Nation and so we would expect that we would reach that point before the rest of the world. Just when would the rest of the world reach that point?

I love this statement: ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit about how his offspring will fare.''

I have 10 children, 17 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Particularly my great-grandchildren and some of my grandchildren will look back and they will ask themselves, how could they have done it? How could they have gone on feverishly looking for and drilling for oil when it was obvious that it was finite, when it was obvious that there would come a time when we would have to transition from oil to alternative sources of energy?

Now, this is a warning from the past, but that wasn't the only warning that we were going to have because your government has paid for four separate studies of this problem. And the phenomenon is called ``peak oil.'' That's the time at which you reach your maximum production capability; and after that, no matter what you do, production will fall off. As we saw earlier, that happened in the United States in 1970. By the way, by 1980 it was painfully obvious that M. King Hubbert was right, because looking back those 10 years, we say, gee, we really did peak in 1970, didn't we? And we're tipped over and starting down the other side now.

Your government paid for four studies. Why four? Because they didn't like what the first one said, and so they ordered another one and didn't like what that one said, so a third and then a fourth. I have quotes here from two of those studies.

The first of those studies was a study by SAIC, and the primary author of that study was Robert Hirsch, and it's usually referred to as the ``Hirsch Report.'' It was issued in 2005. These are just a couple of quotes from that: World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of confident forecasters project peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is very difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.

The world, they said, has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation, more than a decade before the fact, before peaking occurs, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. We had a temporary problem with the Arab oil embargo in the seventies. This will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions--wood to coal and coal to oil--were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary, the report said.

We were very comfortable living in this ``golden age''--as it is referred to by the father of our nuclear submarine, Hyman Rickover. He noted that the incredible amount of energy and oil permitted us to live a very high-quality life, as compared to our ancestors who had not yet found how to tap into the enormous riches of fossil fuels. When I first heard this statistic I was stunned. I said to myself, it can't be true. One barrel of oil--that's 42 gallons--one barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 25,000 man-hours of effort. That's 12 people working all year. A barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year long. Wow, that seems incredible, doesn't it?

And then I thought, I drive a Prius and it takes me about 50 miles on a gallon of gasoline, not very big, a gallon of gasoline. Now, I could pull my Prius that 50 miles, but it would take me a long time. With the come-alongs and the chains and hooking to the guardrail and trees, I could get the Prius that 50 miles. Wow, I said, maybe there are 25,000 man-hours of work in one barrel of oil.

Now, it wasn't very long ago that oil was worth $12 a barrel. That means that you could buy the life-enhancing effects of having a full- time servant work for you all year long, and you could buy it at the well head for $1. If you look around the world and see the quality of life that most of the world's people live, it is really quite incredible compared to the quality of life that our ancestors lived before they found how to tap into the enormous potential of fossil fuels.

There was another report which issued in 2005, and that was a report by the Corps of Engineers. And here is a quote from that report: ``In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural, simple curve-- production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines at a rapid pace similar to its initial increase.'' This is the bell curve, the curve that M. King Hubbert had noted that permitted him to make his prediction as to when the United States would reach its maximum oil production.

The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, but when it will peak. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves giving rise to many estimates of when peak oil will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline.

Your government didn't like what these two studies said, and so there were two more studies ordered, one from the Government Accountability Office and the fourth one from the National Petroleum Council. I do not have quotes from these two; but they say essentially the same thing, that the peaking of oil is inevitable with potentially catastrophic consequences. Since your government didn't want to hear what these reports said, it didn't pay any attention to what the reports said, and we have gone on with policies of Drill, Baby, Drill.

Just recently, there have been two more reports that tell us where we are--they also look at where we have been--and they make their prediction of where we are going. The first of these reports is the one on top that issued in '08. And the people who issued it were the IEA, the International Energy Agency. They are a creature of the OECD, a consortium of major industrial countries. There is a similar organization, the Energy Information Administration, which is a part of our Department of Energy. And they do similar things and have published similar curves; but this is the IEA, the International Energy Agency.

The blue part of the chart here represents conventional oil. Now, if they had a long enough chart, it would go back here about 100 or more years. We started pumping way back here when we didn't need much, and so we didn't pump much. And every time we needed more oil, we could find more oil and we could pump more oil. And we've been doing that now for right at 150 years.

And so here we are now. And what they show in this chart is the total liquid fuels--that's the line up here--has been plateaued. You can see it's flat there at 84 million barrels a day. We've been stuck there for 5 years now.

We're in a recession worldwide. We aren't using as much oil as we might use. And still oil hovers near $100 a barrel. A couple, 3 years ago when the world's economy, including ours, kind of had a momentary collapse, the oil prices dropped down to $40 a barrel. But the reality of the supply compared to the demand, the prices steadily rose until oil is right at $100 a barrel now.

What this chart showed was a fairly significant drop-off in the production of oil from our conventional oil field. This is following the same curve, you note, that was followed by the United States after 1970. So our 1970 plateau is the world's plateau that occurred--what?-- '05 to '09, something like that, was roughly when their curve occurred.

The chart here has several other contributions to our liquid fuels. The top on here is natural gas liquids, and you saw that in the previous chart. That's

propane and butane and liquids like that. The green one under it is nonconventional oil. That is growing, and that will grow. That's oil from places like the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, where they have a lift there, a shovel that can lift 100 tons at a time. It dumps it into a truck that hauls 400 tons, and then they haul it to a big cooker, and they heat it up so that the oil will flow. It won't flow otherwise.

They have a large amount of what we call stranded natural gas. Stranded natural gas is natural gas that is where you don't have very many people. And since it can't be moved--it's not a liquid. It's a gas, and it's difficult to move long distances, so it's cheaper when it's stranded, and so they're using this stranded natural gas as an energy source to warm this oil up so that it will flow.

The next little wedge there, a dark red wedge, really is a part of the dark blue one down here. It's enhanced oil recovery. It's the additional oil we get by pumping live steam down there or pumping seawater down there, or pushing CO2 down there to push it out. Enhanced oil recovery, that is growing. That will grow because we're finding more ways of doing that.

Then they show two wedges to keep this production line going up, because they think it should go up, and so we'll just find some oil so that it will go up. The light blue here is oil from the fields that we've found but are too difficult to develop, like the field in the Gulf of Mexico that is under 7,000 feet of water and--what?--30,000 feet of rock. It's way down there. As the price of oil goes up, why, more and more of these fields will be feasibly economically developed.

The bright red wedge there is a wedge of fields yet to be discovered because they, predictably, cannot get enough oil from the fields that we have discovered. They're too difficult to develop now, so we'll need to find some new fields.

Notice that by 2030 they have predicted that we would rise from our current 84 million barrels of oil a day to about 106 million barrels of oil a day.

Now, this same organization, the IEA, issued another chart 2 years later, in '10, and this chart is pretty different. It shows, of course, the same plateau. Actually, they show a little dip here. Is it starting down or is that simply an undulation at the plateau?

They have reversed the top two contributions and given them different colors, but they're the same thing. This is natural gas liquids, the purple one, and the yellow one is nonconventional oil production.

Notice that they don't show the little wedge here for enhanced oil recovery. They have included it where it ought to be, simply as a part of the production from the current oil fields. And notice, they go out to '35 rather than '30 in this chart. They go out 5 years further, and they show a really precipitous reduction in the amount of oil that we're going to get from the fields that we're presently pumping.

And so, to keep this curve going up, because it must go up if the world is going to have any opportunity for a growing economy, to keep the curve going up, they are predicting two huge wedges that will come from the fields that we have now discovered: the too difficult to develop and fields yet to be discovered.

There is little confidence that these prognostications will occur. The United States could not do this. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world, and we could not reverse the decline of oil production in our country. And most of those who are serious students in this area do not believe that these two wedges will occur. So it is very probable that what the world is going to do is what the United States has done, and that is that it will tip over and there will be ever less and less oil, harder and harder to get, and more and more expensive.

The next chart kind of puts this in a global perspective. This is a chart which shows what the size of the countries of the world would look like if their size were relevant to the amount of oil reserves that they have. And you notice here that Saudi Arabia dominates the world. That's because Saudi Arabia may--we aren't really sure because they won't open their books. Saudi Arabia may have 22 percent of all the reserves in the world.

You may remember, oh, 6 weeks or a couple months ago, there was a WikiLeaks expose that said that maybe the Saudis had overestimated their oil reserves by as much as 40 percent. So the map might not look quite like this, but relatively like this.

Now, why would they overestimate their reserves?

When OPEC couldn't produce more oil than they were producing and they were all anxious for more revenues, OPEC decided that they would limit their production so as to keep the price of oil up. And so they permitted each of the countries to pump a percentage of their reserves.

And so if you look back at the history of this, you will see that, without finding any new fields, their reserves could go up 50 percent, sometimes their reserves doubled. It was kind of a contest amongst liars, because the more you said you had, the more you could pump because you could pump a percentage of what your reserves were. So we really aren't sure what these reserves are because they will not open their books, but it's roughly like this. Certainly, the largest reserves of all the oil are in Saudi Arabia.

Look at those countries around them, Iran and Iraq and Kuwait. Little Kuwait, that looks like a province down there in the corner of Iraq, and look how much oil they have. The United Arab Emirates, you can hardly find them on a map.

Now, I want you to look for the countries on the map that have the largest economic activity, and that's the United States. We represent a fourth of all the economic activity in the world. We're one person out of 22, and we have a fourth of all the good things in the world.

It's really interesting to ask yourself: How come? What is so different about the United States that this one person out of 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world?

That is a subject for another time, and we will come and talk about that, but it's an interesting challenge: Why?

Look at the United States here. We have only 2 percent of the reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 percent of the oil in the world.

Now look at Europe. It's hard to find them on this map, isn't it? Europe, collectively, is economically a bit bigger than the United States, and they're even in worse shape than we are as far as having oil reserves. They are almost totally dependent on oil which is shipped in.

And now look to find the two countries that have between them better than 2\1/2\ billion people out of our 7 billion people in the world, China and India. See them over here? Tiny, tiny. They have very small reserves of oil.

Last year the Chinese bought 13 million cars. We struggled to sell 12 million cars. China is now the world's largest polluter. They just passed us. We're number two in that category. China's economy is growing very rapidly. Their demands for oil are increasing rapidly. I do not have the chart here, but China is buying up oil all over the world.

I asked the State Department why would China buy oil. We have only 2 percent. We use 25 percent. We're not buying oil anywhere. I said why would China buy oil. You see, you get your oil today by going to the global oil auction and if you have the money--it's dollars today; let's hope it stays that. If it turns to yen or euros, we're going to be in a heap of trouble. And if you have the money, you get the oil. So you're not benefited at all by owning oil today.

The State Department's answer was, I'm not sure China understands the marketplace. Wow. A country at that time growing at 14 percent, I think China understands the marketplace. I think they understand that there is such a thing as peak oil. Well, do they understand that?

Five years ago, I led a codel to China, this holiday season. I was in Shanghai on New Year's Eve. Nine of us went to talk about energy. China began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Of course there will be a post-oil world. It's not today.

We're not running out of oil. That's not what we're running out of. There is a lot of oil left. There is more oil left than all of the oil we have used in all of the world's history up to now. What we're running out of is our ability to

produce that oil at the increasing rate to meet increasing demands. We're not running out. There will be oil for another 150 years. Ever less and less, more and more expensive, harder and harder to get.

Our time is running out.

If you have only one chart to look at, this would be the chart.

This is when we discovered oil way back there. Huge amounts of oil. This dark, heavy line here is our consumption of oil. You need to kind of thank the Arabs or their Arab oil embargo. If they hadn't had that in the seventies, look where this curve would be. It would have gone off the top of the chart. That woke us up. Your air conditioner now is probably three times as efficient as your air conditioner was then.

Well, we will return to talk about what can we do about this. Today, we talked only about the problem. It's a huge problem. We're equal to that problem. We'll be back and talk about how we respond to the problem.

I yield back the balance of my time.

On November 18 Ron Smith, a respected and beloved Baltimore-area radio talk show host on WBAL, as well as a columnist for the Baltimore Sun, announced his retirement after 26 years because of his diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer and impending death.

I ask all of my colleagues to join me, along with thousands of loyal listeners and readers who have expressed their deep appreciation and admiration for Ron Smith. Ron unfailingly contributed a voice of reason with unmatched candor while providing a forum for civil and vigorous debate about politics and policy that is sorely needed everywhere in America.

I feel privileged to have been a guest a number of times on Ron's show on WBAL. It was always equally a pleasure and a challenge to meet Ron's high standards. Ron is a true conservative in the classical and historical meaning of the term. With equal enthusiasm and utmost respect, Ron asked tough questions of guests and callers and dissected the arguments of liberal elites, Democrats and Republicans, and others who call themselves conservative.

From a vast knowledge of both history and government, Ron Smith shared, and we in Maryland were most privileged to benefit from, his succinct and persuasive dialogue and dedication to liberty and reason.

Thank you, Ron. Godspeed.

Mr. Speaker, as we celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, I want to salute Army Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Rascon of Laurel, Maryland, one of the 41 men of Hispanic heritage who have received our military's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor.

Alfred Rascon was born in Mexico, but joined the Army after graduating from high school in California. He explained, ``I volunteered to join the military and serve in Vietnam [before I became a citizen] because I was always an American in my heart.''

While serving as a medic, Rascon's reconnaissance platoon came under fierce enemy attack in thick jungle on March 16, 1966. Rascon repeatedly used his own body as a shield against withering fire and saved the lives of two wounded buddies and tried in vain to save the life of a third. Despite wounds from gunfire, shrapnel and a grenade explosion in his face, he raced into a hail of bullets and recovered an M-60 machine gun and ammunition. That action turned the tide of the encounter and may well have saved the lives of his entire platoon. Rascon refused evacuation before other injured buddies.

Alfred Rascon served two more combat tours in Vietnam and also served additional tours since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan. He continues to serve our country speaking to our youth. America is blessed by generations of immigrant Medal of Honor recipients like Alfred Rascon. They are heroes who sacrificed themselves to save the lives of others and put their newly adopted country above their own self-interest. There is no greater love than a man lay down his life for a friend.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the Defense Intelligence Agency on the occasion of its' 50th Anniversary.

Created in 1961, DIA is our nation's premier provider of intelligence on foreign military intentions and capabilities. DIA's workforce of over 16,500 military and civilian intelligence professionals conducts all-source analysis, human and technical intelligence collection, counterintelligence and provides secure information technology support worldwide for military commanders, warfighters and policymakers.

DIA is responsible for the Defense Attache System, Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT Center, National Defense Intelligence College, National Media Exploitation Center, National Center for Credibility Assessment and several specialized intelligence centers: the Underground Facility Analysis Center, the Missile and Space Intelligence Center and the Joint Intelligence Task Force--Combating Terrorism.

In addition to these components, I am especially pleased that DIA's National Center for Medical Intelligence, NCMI, is located in my Congressional District on Fort Detrick. NCMI's 150 civilian and military intelligence analysts and scientists are charged with preparing and coordinating intelligence on foreign health threats and medical issues to protect U.S. interest worldwide.

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a frequent visitor to NCMI and Fort Detrick, I have received numerous briefings from DIA and NCMI personnel. Each time I have been briefed by DIA analysts I have been impressed by the Agency's expertise identifying medical threats to U.S. forces and our allies, and the insights these intelligence professionals bring on foreign military intentions and capabilities.

During DIA's five decades of existence, the Agency has remained agile in the face of evolving national security threats. From the Cold War, to the Vietnam War, to the first Gulf War, DIA's early efforts focused on understanding and, if necessary, defeating state-sponsored militaries and providing strategic warning.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, DIA has responded to the asymmetric threat posed by transnational terrorist groups such as al-Qaida by pushing more analytic and collection capabilities forward in direct support of our military forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Today intelligence professionals from across DIA, including personnel from NCMI are forward deployed alongside our troops to provide the best and most timely military intelligence possible.

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the men and women of DIA on 50 years of service. Guided by their Agency motto ``Committed to Excellence in Defense of the Nation'', I am confident that DIA will be standing watch to defeat the threats we face today and to indentify and meet the national security challenges of the next 50 years and beyond.

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise to support my colleague Donna Edwards and her bill to reduce the corporate tax in order to create more jobs in this country.

The corporate tax is, perhaps, the most regressive tax we have because, in reality, you cannot tax a corporation. It simply becomes a part of the cost of doing business, and they pass it on to the consumer, who pays the tax, which makes everything cost more that the consumer buys, so the consumer will be benefited in several ways when we reduce the corporate tax rate.

Corporations will grow, and there will be more jobs. More corporations will move to this country, creating more jobs. By the way, the revenue stream from this increase in the size of corporations and in the number of corporations may actually increase as a result of reducing the tax rate. There will be more jobs for our consumers, and the things they buy will cost less. This is a win-win-win for everybody.

Thank you, Congresswoman Edwards, for your leadership.

Mr. Speaker, today is the 14th Annual Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo and Forum going on until 4:30 p.m. in the Cannon Caucus room. The theme of this year's expo is

I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I wanted to spend just a few moments putting our discussions in context. This year, the deficit will be perhaps as much as $1.6 trillion.

Now, our total discretionary spending--that's the money that we vote here to spend, and spend nearly a year doing it--is a little over a trillion dollars. A bit more than half of that is the Defense budget. What that means is if we didn't have any government that we vote to spend money for here, if we had no Defense, we had no Homeland Security, if we had no EPA, if we had no NIH, if we had no WIC program, if we had none of the myriad Departments of government that serve us every day, we'd still have a half-trillion-dollar deficit. I'm not sure that the reality of this has gotten through to our Congress or the American people.

Another way of looking at this is that we have revenues of about $2.2 trillion a year, but our mandatory spending--that's interest on the debt and our means-tested welfare programs and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security--are several hundred billion dollars more than that. What that means is that one second after midnight on January 1, we're already in debt that year several hundred billion dollars, and we haven't even started to pay for the defense of our country, for Homeland Security, for NIH, for the WIC program, or for any of these many, many programs that our government supports.

There is no way with the meager cuts that we're making in these budgets that we're voting on that we're ever going to get to anything near a balance.

I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

I was just trying to put in context our discussion here and what it means.

Reclaiming my time, we have a $1.6 trillion deficit. We're coming close to that this year. The Ryan budget was kind of an expression of his roadmap. And in the last Congress only eight of us had the courage to sign on to his roadmap, because it was pretty tough. This year, when he filed that roadmap again, I think 13 of us signed on. And then we had the Ryan budget, which is even tougher, I think, than his roadmap, but what else was there to vote for, and almost nobody read it, so we voted for it anyhow.

The Ryan budget doesn't balance for 25 years. It doesn't balance for 25 years. That means with that budget, with all of its austerity, for 25 years we still are accumulating more and more and more debt. Every six hours we have another billion-dollar deficit, which means another billion-dollar debt. About every 12 hours we have another billion- dollar trade deficit.

Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to put our discussions in context. I have 10 kids and 17 grandkids and two great-grandkids. I sure would like to leave them a country better than the country as I find it. And it's going to be really tough to do that. What I want for us to do as Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, is to sit down and talk through this. How are we going to solve this problem? Grandstanding and making these political points is not going to get us there.

Mr. Chairman, we have got to do something serious. I don't see the Congress doing that.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I rise in support of the Boehner resolution.

I am not here today to argue whether or not we should be in Libya. That is an argument for another day. What I'm here today concerned with is how we got into Libya, because I think that was a very important precedent.

We went into Libya on March 19, Operation Odyssey Dawn. Just 12 days later, a House committee met and Secretary Gates was there and I made this statement: ``I'm among many people who feel that President Obama has involved the United States in an unconstitutional and illegal war in Libya.''

That same day I dropped H.R. 1323, which asked the President to find offsets in non-defense discretionary spending to pay for the war in Libya that was not authorized by the Congress because we have no money, and I shouldn't ask my kids and my grandkids to pay for that war. This is not the king's army. The power to move our Army into Libya is not inherent in Commander in Chief. If it were, they would not have put in article I, section 8, the responsibility of the Congress to declare war.

This is an unconstitutional and illegal war. I think it sets a very dangerous precedent, and I hope that we make that very clear in our deliberations today.